The Cybersecurity Canon: Winning As a CISO

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Book Review: Winning as a CISO (2005) by Rich Baich

Executive Summary

The latest candidate for the Cybersecurity Canon is Rich Baich’s Winning as a CISO. The roles of the chief information officer (CIO), the chief security officer (CSO), and the chief information security officer (CISO) in the modern enterprise have been constantly changing since we invented the need for such roles in the 1980s and 1990s. By the mid-2000s, the industry had settled on tucking the security function for an organization under the IT function of an organization. In other words, the CISO works for the CIO.

But Baich is an innovative thinker. He has looked at how the CISO role has evolved over the years and makes a pretty good case for where it needs to go next. By asking questions about the appropriate supervisor for a CISO, a CISO’s needed skill set, and ways to approach the CISO job function, Baich breaks new ground on how the industry should view these topics. Our industry will be slow to adopt these new ideas, but with the rash of highly publicized and impactful data breaches to the retail sector in 2014, perhaps the industry is ready to start making a change. Reviewing Baich’s book is a good place to start. It is Cybersecurity Canon-worthy, and you should have read it by now.

Introduction

The roles of the CIO, the CSO, and the CISO in the modern enterprise have been constantly changing since we invented the need for such roles in the 1980s and 1990s. I picked up Winning as a CISO because my boss handed it to me after he met the author, Rich Baich, at a security event. Baich was a smart guy and had some interesting ideas about the modern CISO’s role in today’s environments. In this book, Baich explains some innovative thinking about what today’s CISOs should be responsible for, how they should fit into the organization, and how they might accomplish their tasks once they are established. In order to understand where Baich is coming from, it is useful to review the history of the CIO, CSO, and CISO roles in modern business.

Because of General Motors’ success with this new P&L model, business leaders across the world adopted it for their own organizations. That model lasted some 60 years until the 1980s when CEOs realized that in order to drive organizational change, they needed executives with technical and functional specialties. CEOs began creating new C-level executive positions like chief marketing officers (CMOs), chief financial officers (CFOs), and, yes, CIOs. The idea of a C-level executive dedicated to security did not really emerge until the late 1990s, 10 years after the CIO position had become firmly established in modern business.

The first practitioners came out of the technical ranks. Vendor solutions to mitigate the cyber threat ran on networks and workstations. In order to manage those solutions, it was helpful to have people who understood that world, but this was a new thing for the techies; trying to translate technical risk to a business leader did not always go very well. Security techies have always been, and still are, passionate about their responsibilities. The early trailblazers tended to say “no” to any new project because of the potential security risk. The business leaders did not want to deal with these people who wanted to make organizational decisions with no thought about the bottom line. It became convenient to tuck these kinds of people underneath the CIO organization. CISOs began working for the CIO because, from the C-suite perspective, all of that technical stuff belonged in one basket, and the security people did not know how to talk to the business people.

As business leaders began applying resources to mitigate cyber risk, other areas of security risk started to emerge: physical security, compliance, fraud prevention, business continuity, safety, ethics, privacy, brand protection, etc. The idea of the CSO role began to gain popularity with business leaders because they needed someone to look at the entire business, not just cybersecurity risk to the business, but general security risk to the business. CSO Magazine launched in 2002 to cater to that crowd.

By the mid-2000s, the industry had settled on tucking the security function for an organization under the IT function for an organization. In other words, the CISO works for the CIO. This is not bad, per se, and this arrangement works in many organizations. The IT folks generally handle the daily automation functions while the security teams have more of an oversight role in terms of security architecture, policy, risk assessment, and security operations.

But since then, the industry has been in flux. Not every company is organized the same way. While the CIO role has made its way to the senior executive suite in some companies (Intel Corp. and McAfee to name two), that is by no means the norm. The CSO role is likewise lagging. Both tend to be lodged at the second tier of executives in many companies. And while it is not universal, the CISO still tends to work for the CIO.

The Story

All of this history is essential background to the key messages in Baich’s book Winning as a CISO. He published it in 2005 and was quite rightly taking a look at where the CISO role was heading next. He organized the book as a fictional story about an established company in which the CEO had decided to hire his first CISO. His executive leadership team – the CIO, the general counsel, and the chief operating officer (COO) – had to decide what the new CISO’s responsibilities were and where this individual would fit in the organizational structure. Once the CEO made those decisions, the newly hired CISO had to decide how to execute this new role.

The Tech

The book is a quick read, with only 115 pages including the end credits, but it is a primer on what a CISO should do for any organization. In essence, any organization could use Baich’s book as a basic job description for a new CISO hire.

What Are a CISO’s Responsibilities?

When the story’s CEO brought his executive staff together to discuss the new position, he had them develop a list of responsibilities for the new hire. Here is the list:

Security Architecture

Incident Response

Security Awareness

Identity Management

Security Policy Development and Compliance

Due Diligence for Acquisitions and Mergers

Risk Management

I think this is a pretty good list of high-level responsibilities. Anything that comes up later that we might want the CISO to do can be easily shoehorned into one of these broad categories. Once the staff agreed to the responsibilities, the next step was to determine which senior executive should own them. In other words, which senior executive should the CISO work for?

To Whom Does the CISO Report?

All of the senior staff members had their perspectives. The CIO said, “The CISO should report to the IT Department because the focus of information security is related to technology. Information security solves technology related risks.” The general counsel said, “The CISO should report through the legal structure. [The] focus can be placed on compliance.” The COO said, “The CISO will have to collaborate with all departments, and everyone, including the sales team will benefit, but the team member who will need to utilize the resulting information the most will be the COO. A clear understanding of the operational risk factors will enable the successful CISO to present to the COO with a rubric of important options.”

The CEO weighed each of these perspectives and had a few of his own. He said that he did not want the new CISO to have to wrestle with any artificial organizational conflicts because he chose to put the position under one senior executive as opposed to another. He said that putting the CISO under the CIO had a number of problems, but the most important one was that it created a conflict of interest. “Reporting to the CIO would be like putting your boss on report.” The CISO’s job is to make things more secure, and sometimes that job may be in direct conflict with the CIO’s job of making things more efficient. With the CISO under the CIO, the organization automatically weights efficiency needs over security needs, and that obviates the reason to hire the CISO in the first place.

An opposing view comes from Forbes reporter Howard Baldwin. Baldwin complained in March 2014 that he did not like recent changes he was seeing within organizations that had broken out the security function to be a peer to the CIO. He says that these CIOs are highly paid executives who can handle competing priorities. In other words, the CIO can handle making decisions between security and efficiency. That is what we pay a person in this position to do.

In Baich’s story, the CEO had reservations about putting the CISO under other staff organizations too. He said that putting the CISO under the general counsel “would potentially position the Information Security department as an arm of the audit department.”According to Baich, auditing support is something the new CISO should help with, but based on the responsibilities the executive staff developed, the CISO’s role is much bigger.

The CEO ultimately put the CISO under the COO. To him, it made sense that the CISO position be perfectly positioned to support the entire organization and not one specific staff element. I think this makes sense. If loss associated with security is something that will potentially materially affect the business, it makes total sense to raise the platform of the person in charge of it to have a view of the entire organization and the power to affect change. If that is the case, then what skill sets are needed for the person who takes on that responsibility?

What Skill Sets Does a CISO Need?

Once he decided whom the CISO should work for, the CEO turned again to his senior staff to determine what skill sets would be essential for success. Without fanfare, Baich lists these five attributes:

Must have an MBA

Prior budget or P&L experience

A proven ability to lead an effective information security organization

Experience and skill as a change agent

Ability to serve as an information security expert for the executive team

The last three skills are fairly standard for many senior job positions in any organization. The first two are where Baich is providing some innovative thinking. Requiring an MBA and P&L experience for a CISO, as a mandatory requirement, is not the common thinking in the industry, but it is spot on for where the industry needs to go. As I said earlier, most CISOs have come up through the technical ranks and have little if any business experience. This is probably the main reason that security teams and business teams have a hard time communicating with each other. By requiring a CISO to have business experience first, Baich flips the typical experience equation on its head. Instead of training highly technical employees to be proficient in business concerns at the mid- to latter parts of their careers, he is suggesting that we take traditional business people and train them to be proficient in managing security operations.

“If performing vulnerability assessments, configuring firewalls, and performing network forensics makes you happy then becoming Chief Information Security Officer may not be the right career choice for you.”

Just like a traditional business person might find himself or herself as a general manager, product manager, finance officer, or marketing officer, Baich is suggesting we add security officer to the list, and I agree with him.

How Do You Be a CISO?

In Baich’s story, the CEO placed the CISO under the COO in order to give the position a matrixed view of the business. In that kind of environment, how does a CISO succeed? In spite of all the listed responsibilities this CISO has for the organization, Baich says that the most important implied responsibility for the CISO is running his or her organization like a business. The CISO needs to become the general manager of the security program.

“Ultimately, the success of any business, new or old, depends on a leader’s ability to build a team, market and sell the product, and run the business, still meeting the established measurements necessary to effectively operate the business.”

Although the CISO in this story will bring in no revenue, this individual has to demonstrate to the business leadership the value of the position in other ways. The CISO must become a world-class internal marketing person for every aspect of the security program. It is not enough to make the organization more secure. The CISO’s efforts to do so must demonstrably show how the security program is helping the organization grow.

Conclusion

Baich is an innovative thinker. He has looked at how the CISO role has evolved over the years and makes a pretty good case for where it needs to go next. By asking questions about the appropriate supervisor for a CISO, a CISO’s needed skill set, and ways to approach the CISO job function, Baich breaks new ground on how to think about these topics. Baich published the book in 2005. Back then, there was not a lot of impetus to change the current situation, and I do not see the industry adopting these ideas any time soon. But with the rash of highly publicized and impactful data breaches to the retail sector in 2014, perhaps the industry is ready to make a change. It is obvious that the way we are doing it now is not working. Because of Baich’s innovative thinking about the next step in the evolution of the CISO role, Winning as a CISO is Cybersecurity Canon-worthy, and you should have read it by now.

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